Obama rips Trump over sending National Guard troops in hometown Chicago | EUROtoday

Former President Barack Obama lambasted President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops into Chicago, arguing {that a} president sending U.S. troops into American cities “against their own people” is “inherently corrupting.”

Obama, talking to comic Marc Maron on the ultimate episode of his WTF podcast printed Monday, additionally prompt that Republicans and right-wing media would have been outraged if he had equally despatched in troops to GOP-led states whereas they cheer on the present president.

He accused Trump of attempting to “deliberately” subvert federal legislation and politicizing the army for his personal means.

“It wasn’t controversial for me to go to other countries and say, ‘You know what? It’s a good idea for militaries to be under civilian control,’ because when you have military that can direct force against their own people, that is inherently corrupting,” Obama stated.

“And so when you now start seeing the politicization of the military — deliberately, right,” he added.

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He known as Trump’s federalization of National Guard troops “a deliberate end run around” of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prevents the usage of the nation’s army for home legislation enforcement.

The legislation says “don’t use our military on domestic soil unless there is an extraordinary emergency of some sort,” Obama stated. “When you see an administration suggest that ordinary street crime is an insurrection, or—”

“A terrorist act,” Maron added.

“A terrorist act,” Obama replied. “That is a genuine effort to weaken how we have understood democracy.”

He prompt that if he had despatched troops to Republican strongholds,

“Man, it’s almost too easy of a thought experiment,” Obama stated. “If I had just sent the National Guard into Texas, and just said, You know what? Lot of problems in Dallas. Lot of crime there. I don’t care what [Governor Greg Abbott] thinks. I’m gonna kind of take over law enforcement

“It is mind boggling to me how Fox News would have responded,” he stated.

Federal judges throughout the nation have reined in Trump’s use of federalized troops because the administration surges federal legislation enforcement into Democratic-led states and cities to fight protests in opposition to his anti-immigration agenda.

Trump is briefly blocked from sending troops into Chicago, however an appeals court docket isn’t sending service members house, for now, whereas authorized battles are ongoing.

“We have blown through, just over the last six months, a whole range of not simply assumptions, but rules and laws and practices that were put in place to ensure that nobody is above the law, and we don’t use the federal government to simply reward our friends and punish our enemies,” Obama stated.

“People are right to be concerned,” he added.

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California sued the administration earlier this 12 months within the wake of Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and U.S. Marines into Los Angeles in response to protests in opposition to large-scale immigration raids and arrests.

A federal decide in California decided that the administration illegally deployed army belongings into the town in violation of Posse Comitatus, which the decide stated seemed to be a part of an effort to create “a national police force with the president as its chief.”

Illinois and Oregon officers are equally suing the administration over troop deployments to these states, allegedly in violation of Posse Comitatus in addition to Tenth Amendment protections guaranteeing that police authority rests with the states and never the federal authorities.

Democratic officers have argued that the president is sending in troops for “wholly pretextual” causes in an try to fire up extra unrest to justify extra federal officers and a wider army occupation, together with invocation of the Insurrection Act.

National Guard troops had been deployed to Baltimore in 2015 throughout Obama’s second time period in workplace, after the loss of life of Freddie Gray in police custody sparked widespread protests.

Those troops, nonetheless, remained below the command of Maryland’s Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, not Obama.

Maron ended his long-running podcast Monday after 16 years and greater than 1,600 episodes with an hour-long interview with the previous president, who final appeared on the podcast whereas he was nonetheless in workplace.